I know the Spring
bright light clear light
singing from on highest height
abundance, promise
spilling forth
pouring out and over and through

I know the Spring for it fills me up to full.

I am honored to be featured today by the Nature Blog Network! I hope you’ll take a moment to visit their site and stay awhile. They do good work there, do Mike and Wren, and John, and N8. Thank you all, especially Wren who interviewed me so painlessly, making me sound much better than I had any business sounding! I also want to thank my readers for keeping me on the front page of the birding list that the Nature Blog Network keeps. Thank you!

Lost baby Wood Duck. Found by a friend under her car. No sign of Mom. I sent her back home with directions to leave it in a safe place where Mom could find it but keeping a watchful eye on it. She will call our local native animal rescue if Mom doesn’t show up. Poor thing.

UPDATE: Mama never showed up so young Bob Marley (10 year old girl named it!) was sent off to Native Animal Rescue to be cared for properly!

Even with all the parrots . . . something about this photo just makes me warm and fuzzy inside.

Maybe it’s the fact that it’s focused on the plants behind the bird? Maybe it’s that all the WCSP were looking so plump and fluffy and this one clearly saw something cool and needed to really look at it? Maybe it’s his funny wing position?

If, like me, you only turn your Kindle2‘s WhisperNet on when you are purchasing something, go ahead and do so now. Amazon is rolling out software update version 2.0.3 for the Kindle via WhisperNet right now. I learned about it from one of the Kindle blogs I read, Blog Kindle. You can learn more about the Kindle2’s wireless updates here. Evidently, the update will download automagically and then when you Kindle goes to sleep, the update will be installed. Ta Da!

The key is that they roll out their updates to groups of users so when you turn it on, it may not be your turn yet. So you might have to wait patiently, turning your WhisperNet on now and again until the update happens. While there is a way to update manually, I’m not interested in messing with my Kindle2 too much so I’m going to leave that to others who are willing to “brick” their Kindles. I’ll let mine update on it’s own, thank you. Nobody here but us chickens!

In other news, the Kindle Store is now carrying some of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, including The Hobbit, all three Lord of the Rings books, and his last work (edited posthumously by his son), The Children of Hurin. If you haven’t read these amazing works lately (well, I haven’t read the last one at all) . . . now’s your chance!

My husband started watching TopGear and before you know it, we’re all sucked in. These insane Brits . . . Jeremy, James, and Richard are wild men behind the wheel. They love fast, powerful cars and drive them around the TopGear track in England. They have a tame race car driver named The Stig. My favorite part is the contests they are put through ridiculous challenges. They are obnoxious and silly and we just sit back and laugh. Oh, and the bickering. They fight and treat each other horribly.

We watched an episode the other day where they went camping . . . it didn’t go well . . . anyway, as part of their activities while camping. They went twitching . . . TopGear style. I was all excited until they started pointing out cars going by on the highway near their campsite. Hilarious. Oh, they also set the camper on fire. Seriously.

Not a lifer. Not the most common. Not a showy standout of a bird. But, a happy surprise. There were dozens of White-Crowned Sparrows on the hedge. I took a couple of shots to capture them, hoping for a really nice shot. Instead, I got a surprise. A golden crown gracing one of them . . . I love surprises!